Maps for Lost Lovers

boiling metal turned the water poisonous, yes.”
    He unbuckles his belt and undoes the top two buttons of his jeans to enter the bed.
    Kaukab turns to leave the room. “What an awful story to remember.” She wants to examine his face, to understand why he had made that comment about the suicide, but she hears him taking his pants off, the slide of fabric against skin, and therefore cannot look in his direction. “Are you sure you will be comfortable in this room? The kitchen is directly below and I am going to be cooking all day: the smell of spices will rise right through the floorboards and the carpet.”
    “Close the door as you leave.”
    Downstairs, she lets out an inward sound—echo, and then echo of echo—a cry in the forest of old age, loneliness. He is out of reach, no doubt holding her responsible for Chanda and Jugnu’s disappearance. She senses loathing in him, a wall-like hate in whose foundations lie the bloody cut-up bodies of the two lovers. She thought he would be happier than he is. She’d thought he’d ask her, Did you miss me? And that she would answer: No more than I’d miss my eyes. They haven’t seen each other for eight years and have, therefore, a total of sixteen-years’ worth of life to catch up on, but he has barely said a word. Mah-Jabin and Charag have sent her photographs of him during his absence, but they stopped when he found out and threatened to cut himself off from them too.
    It had taken her decades to rebuild the happiness she had lost when she moved to England: she had built it around her children, and, yes, around Jugnu, but she had never realized how loosely woven a thing it was, how easily torn.
    She breathes in against a wave of tears and sits there for a few minutes before getting up carefully. There is a lot to do. She had peeled the potatoes last night and covered them in water to stop the rusting, and the base for the pilau rice was readied last night too: just a matter of reheating it half-an-hour before it’s time to sit down at the dinner table and dropping the rice in it. An illiterate woman came by yesterday to ask her if she would read a letter from her brother in Pakistan, and she and Kaukab had spent the afternoon chopping up all the onions that would be needed today.
    And the dozens of cloves of garlic got peeled as though all by themselves when the matchmaker stopped by in the evening and the two of them talked as they worked, the topics under discussion varying from recipes to djinns, from the new fabrics to become available in the clothes shops to all the successful marriages the matchmaker had arranged this year, the most recent one of a woman named Suraya about whose beauty she never tired of speaking.
    After the dawn prayers today, Kaukab sat down with a basket and extracted the peas from each peapod with the skill of a pickpocket.
    The mince for the shami kebabs was boiled with split chickpeas, cinnamon sticks and other spices, two days ago, beaten in a large black-stone mortar with a heavy wooden pestle until it had the texture of wet sand and came out from between the fingers in sculpted waves when squeezed in a fist. It was patted into small discs: they are in the fridge now, and all that remains is to dip them in egg and shallow-fry them in sunflower oil minutes before eating—the egg coating would seal the mince in the thinnest omelette imaginable. For the fruit salad, she would enlist one of the other guests when they arrive: the fruit—apples, pomegranates (the very last batch of the year), pears, grapes, and peaches that look as though they are apples made out of the finest pink suede—must remain fresh and crunchy. There is coriander and mint chutney to pound in the small marble mortar the size of a green-pigeon’s nest—oh, Jugnu! Oh, my Jugnu!— that she had been given as a present by a woman returning from Pakistan five years ago.
    She takes the coat Ujala has left on the kitchen table and carries it into the pink sitting room. The smell of cooking mustn’t get into the clothes. The whites call the Asians “smelly” but they do have a point: the coats are hung in the kitchens and the pungent smells of the spices get into them. The Asians who have moved out to the suburbs also call the Asians in this poor neighbourhood “smelly” and “stinky.” Some of the women in this neighbourhood are from villages where it is common practice to put butter in the hair: the smell is often rancid. Kaukab makes sure Shamas’s coat